Great Comp Autumn Extravaganza

Sunday saw me driving the few short miles to the gardens of Great Comp for the aptly named Autumn Extravaganza. Having been at Great Dixter the weekend before, October is shaping up to be a month of great gardens and gardening events, and we’re not even half way through.

I arrived in bright sunshine to find the borders in their full late-summer glory, grasses and perennials having filled out and drawn themselves up to their full stature, and giving every impression of returning the admiring glances of the visitors with something approaching condescension, arising from a pride in the knowledge that this, of all moments in the year, is the moment in which they look their absolute best. I think we can allow the contents of the borders their lofty attitude; they look very fine indeed.

On to the plants. A goodly selection of specialist nurseries, although I had the impression that there were fewer than at the Spring Fling. Sufficient in number to provide temptation to a gardener with a roving eye, however.

I was half hoping to track down my unicorn, a plant that I’ve been after all year since one of my clients saw it in the prairie gardens at Wisley. I’d seen a few diminutive pots of the Arkansas bluestar, Amsonia hubrichtii, at Dixter last weekend but, having left my wallet at home, I was saved from having to buy the things – something of which I was quite glad, not having been entirely confident of my ability to see the tiddlers through the winter. Amsonia seems to be growing in popularity – a mainly North American relative of the periwinkle, although not sharing the vinca’s slovenly posture it bears its light blue, star-shaped flowers in early summer on upright stems. It hasn’t been hard to get hold of Amsonia tabernaemontana, and I spied A. ciliata on the stand of Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants at Chelsea earlier in the year (Rob and Rosy stock several species, I’ve subsequently found).

But Hubricht’s bluestar has much thinner, needle-like leaves, and in autumn, it does this...

Amsonia hubrichtii in full autumn colour

...giving the impression of the original Old Testament burning bush. I’ve learned from badgering various people that it does take a good while to bulk up, and had resigned myself to having to wait till next year. So you can imagine my joy to find that Paul Barney of Edulis, had brought several decent sized specimens with him. Those were coming home with me.

Today’s offerings, as you might expect from a plant fair in October, were distinctly shrubby, with the odd climber or tree thrown in for good measure. You might think this would be boring but, in that opinion, you’d be wrong.

I’m always a bit of a sucker for an attractive ilex, and the prickly pineapple holly, Ilex aquifolium 'Myrtifolia' bears perfectly formed, glossy green leaves about an 3cm long by 1cm wide, bristling with spines. It’s a neat, compact specimen, with the young shoots exhibiting a slight purplish tinge.

Ilex aquifolium 'Myrtifolia'

This next plant might quicken the pulse of even the most hardened hater of the ubiquitous evergreen euonymus. Euonymus fortunei 'Wolong Ghost' can be used as a mat-forming ground cover, or trained as a climber. It has thin, deep green glossy leaaves, with a prominent white mid-rib and veins, together with the usual pink spindleberry winged fruit.

Euonymus fortunei 'Wolong Ghost'

Now, writing about what I saw at the weekend, I wish I’d bought them all! But one plant that did come home with me is a variety of something very familiar, in the guise of something completely alien. If I hadn’t read the label, I’d never for a moment have believed this to be a cultivar of the wonderfully scented Confederate jasmine. This is Trachelospermum jasminoides 'Water Wheel', its deep blue-green leaves now having taken on the autumnal purple tint, although the silvery midrib still evident. The flowers are present in summer, although small.

Trachelospermum jasminoides 'Waterwheel'

Continuing the oddly narrow leaved theme of the day, this version of the alder buckthorn was new to me. Frangula alnus 'Fine Line', a deciduous shrub of columnar habit, not quite yet in its autumn shades.

Frangula alnus 'Fine Line'

And who can resist the wonderful autumn colour and rounded lobes of the rootbeer tree, Sassafras albidum? Not I.

Sassafras albidum. Used to flavour rootbeer

As I made my way towards the exit, clutching my small haul of plants, I became aware of a delicious smell, some baked fruit pudding, covered with caramelised sugar and just beginning to catch and burn at the edges. I spend t a few moments scouting the area for the culprit, and soon joined a group of people shuffling about in the fallen leaves beneath a katsura tree, Cercidiphyllum japonicum.

What’s that smell? Probably Cercidiphyllum japonicum

Container Gardening with Harriet Rycroft, week 4

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The final week of the container gardening course with My Garden School. ‘Summer Luxuriance’, it’s entitled, and brimful of information to help you take full advantage of the long days and warm temperatures. Containers should be bursting with fabulous foliage and jewel-bright punches of floral colour from June well into September and beyond, and Harriet guided us through with advice on plant selection, what to grow in sun and shade, as well as some useful tips and tricks, such as growing climbers in pots, and using them to weave in and out of the display.

Irrigation is of course of prime importance during the hottest months, and watering methods were covered, along with other maintenance tasks such as feeding and deadheading.

Once again I was thrown something of a curve-ball by the assignment, in which we were asked to base a container display around our favourite colour. I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t have a favourite colour, tending to base my planting ideas around either harmonious or contrasting colour combinations, rather than monochromatic schemes, which can seem a little flat. So, I have favourite colour combinations to which I return time and again – greys and pinks, greys and yellow, lime green and deep red tones, to name but a few. If there’s one colour to which I’m drawn, it would those tones variously described as black, or burgundy, or deep red-purple – as with the foliage of Cotinus coggygria 'Royal Purple', or Actaea simplex 'Brunette', for example – and so I took this as my starting point.

The brief involved suggesting three plants, each of a different habits (tall, bushy and spreading or trailing) that feature the chosen colour in either foliage or flowers. After some head scratching, the following scribble emerged.

My tall plant is the switchgrass Panicum virgatum, which grows to 1.2 metres, although younger plants in a container are less likely to achieve the full height. The glaucous grey leaves will give some relief to the otherwise monochrome scheme, with deep, metallic red flower heads in August.

Panicum virgatum 'Warrior'

The middle layer is the purple leaved Sedum 'Matrona', with its dense clusters of pink-white flowers.

Sedum 'Matrona'. Image © Crocus

The spreading plant is one of my favourite hardy cranesbills, the pale pink flowered Geranium 'Dusky Crug', again with deep, maroon foliage.

Geranium 'Dusky Crug'

Relatively low maintenance, with minimal deadheading required, all three choices will prefer a free-draining compost, none being voraciously hungry (the sedum in particular has a tendency to become floppy with too rich a medium); neither watering nor feeding need be too onerous a task – depending on conditions, you could water when the compost begins to feel dry (perhaps once a week) and feed once a month.

I’m fond of this combination, but aware that it’s not perhaps quite in the spirit of the brief, reaching its peak in August and September – a pot for late summer and early autumn. If I’m to bring the season of interest forward into early summer, I could stretch the colour theme a little, to embrace deep red stems and foliage and/or crimson flowers. Then we could try a combination built around Lobelia cardinalis 'Queen Victoria', with Heuchera 'Autumn Leaves' occupying the middle layer, above the trailing deep green foliage and of Pelargonium 'Mexican Beauty' this would work well in partial shade, and although the lobelia would be the last to come into flower (August again), there would be plenty of interest throughout the period with the deep maroon of the stems, over the vibrant shades of the heuchera foliage (softened slightly by the white flowers from June) and the longer flowering period of the ivy-leaved pelargonium.

Lobelia cardinalis 'Queen Victoria'. Image © Crocus

Heuchera 'Autumn Leaves'. Image © Crocus

Pelargonium 'Mexican Beauty'. Image ©Fibrex Nurseries

The pelargonium would need to be included in my regular picking-over regime in order to keep it in flower, and a weekly high potash feed would help. Watering needs to take into account that the loblia favours damper conditions than the pelargonium, while the heuchera isn’t too bothered. Which sounds like a faff, but a can minus the rose, or the similar setting on a decent hose attachment, would make it perfectly possible to direct the majority of the water towards the centre of the pot. A good dousing, every other day, unless exceedingly warm or windy.

My imaginary courtyard pot display is now looking rather flamenco-inspired, with this container situated in a slightly sunnier spot than the partially shaded area enjoyed by the panicum-sedum-geranium combo, along with pots full of Dahlia 'Bishop of Llandaff', Cosmos atrosanguineus, Aeonium 'Schwartzkopf' and Ricinus communis 'Carmencita'. With plenty of green in between, and a large jug of sangria.

With thanks to Crocus and Fibrex Nurseries for the use of images.

Details at Great Dixter, and Planty Fare

Would you mind terribly if I were to bore you with a load of photographs of Great Dixter? I thought you probably wouldn’t. It’s just that I can never walk around the gardens there without snapping away hundreds of exposures, torn between attempting to record the perfect, wistfully romantic garden image, recording new (to me) plants and planting combinations, and a desire to put the camera away and just be still. There is so much to learn from every visit here, but while some teaching gardens (Wisley, for example) manage to do this with an engaging but ultimately didactic approach, here it’s a totally immersive experience.

I visited yesterday ostensibly for the autumn Plant Fair, another fantastic event which sees the gathering together of some fine specialist nurseries from the UK and beyond, with a programme of regular talks from the nursery-folk throughout the weekend and, of course, rather good food. On arriving I was pleased to see a friendly face, although Rosemary on the Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants stand was in mid flow, drawing the attention of a crowd to the benefits of some of her stock. First up was what I would until recently have called Aster turbinellus, my parents would still call a Michaelmas daisy, and Rosy was at pains to point out has been reclassified as Symphyotrichum turbinellum (why use two syllables when you can use five?). Growing to four feet tall, it has a lovely open habit, is fairly mildew resistant, and, as I can testify having planted several in a garden besieged by the rotten creatures, will hold its own against rabbits (although they will have a good go at it).

Rosy Hardy explaining the joys of botanical reclassification

Symphotrichum turbinellum from Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants

Next up from Rosy was the beautiful red foliage shrub Physocarpus opulifolius 'Lady in Red'. Bearing sprays of white to pink flowers like the better known P. 'Diablo', it has a more compact habit than typical for a ninebark, which can get a little unruly when established.

Physocarpus opulifolius 'Lady in Red' from Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants

Other familiar names were in evidence. As ever, the selection from Binny's Plants was looking very tempting.

The Binny’s Plants stand at Great Dixter

By the time I’d finished nosing through the selection from Derry Watkins at Special Plants, I was beginning to regret my cunning plan of leaving my wallet at home to prevent me from yet another spending spree.

Derry Watkins of Special Plants, chatting to a fine beard

The Great Dixter Nursery stand, about 50 yards from the actual nursery

I lingered quite some while, effectively window shopping, but inevitably found it was useless to resist the call of the garden, trudging back up the hill and entering through the meadow, full now of autumn crocuses. As ever, the first thing that strikes you on walking down this path is the porch of the house, with containers arranged around the doorway.

The porch displays are always changing. Worth the visit alone.

Plenty for me to analyse here from my photographs over the next few days, but this time of year provides a perfect time to admire the blue-grey Eastern thorn tree on the right hand side, Crataegus orientalis, with its large, round amber haws. A perfect colour combination.

A different kind of hawthorn. Crataegus orientalis

I spied pelargoniums in the grouping of pots to the right of the porch, including one of my favourite species, Pelargonium sidoides with its glaucous kidney-shaped leaves and deep maroon flowers (bottom right). These tender plants will be protected for a while from the cooler temperatures, nestled into the display and out of the immediate chill, although they'll have to be brought into the greenhouse in a week or so. I was also pleased to see the glamorous Persicaria 'Purple Fantasy' that I’d first noticed on the Binny's stand at Wisley last month.

Pelargonium sidoides on the far right, Persicaria 'Purple Fantasy' two points to the left

A visit to Dixter’s gardens can be tricky for me to pace, not least because my favourite sections are right at the start – the meadow, the porch, and the peacock garden, with all their wealth of detail, so that before I'm half way through, I'm both delighted and mentally overstimulated. On my next visit, I might make my way through the garden in the opposite direction. Yesterday, however, I turned left at the house, and headed for the peacock garden.

Entering the Peacock Garden

I do like a detail. The more intricate, and the least fussy – if that's not a contradiction in terms – the better. It could be a small section of wall, with ferns and mosses clinging to the stones, crowned with the vibrant red berries of a self-sown cotoneaster which has been given leave to remain. It might be the pleasing combination of textures framed in my viewfinder – the planes of tightly clipped yew, the russet coloured house, and the feathered silver-gold plumes of miscanthus. In each little vignette, I look for the essence of the garden – that delicately balanced counterpoint between irrepressible force of nature, allowing itself for a while to subdued by the hand of the gardener. You don’t need to be in possession of a peculiar sensitivity to see that at work here.

In the High Garden, I had a moment of affirmation. I've been mildly berating myself for undertaking a slightly bonkers brief early in the new year, to transform an old vegetable garden into a prairie-style planting, but incorporating the fruit trees and soft-fruit. Standing here, however, I felt justified and, knowing this space so well, I’m fairly certain that it must have been there all along, deep in my subconscious, preventing me from trying to talk my clients out of the idea.

Fruit trees, grasses and prairie style perennials

Mine has a little way to go in comparison. But at least I can be confident in my reference point.

Climbing down the steps through the hedge into the orchard garden. What a treat.

Descending again to the long border, and another lesson for me with this openly pruned golden lonicera, echoing the form of the miscanthus in the background. Where I might feel pressure to clip this tight, how much more charming to allow it the space to breathe and assume an open shape. Artfully done, though, L. nitida being notoriously unruly when allowed free reign.

More lessons. I will use a golden spiraea as a blob in a border, but I hadn't thought to allow the form to flow and merge with an erysimum, let alone drape it around with nasturtiums.

Finally, for this trip, an encounter with a rather revolting variegated phlox, which nonetheless proved to be just the thing needed. Now, I can’t say with any certitude that the variegated phlox is a thing which should by law be allowed at all – I have my suspicions that quite the contrary should be the case. But on the long border, it somehow managed to ease a transition from predominantly warm colours to a patch of much cooler, greys, blues and pinks, which might otherwise have seemed to jar. Food for thought – I'm still not entirely sure what I think about the plant, or even about this patch in the border from which the colour appears to have bled, but that is one of the wonderful things about the way Fergus and his team are continually experimenting here, reviewing every element and assessing the role it plays within the whole.

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I didn’t get round the whole garden, for reasons already mentioned. But I think I have time to visit over the next few weeks, before it closes on the 25th of the month.

Container Gardening with Harriet Rycroft, week 3

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I always knew that the third week of this course was where I’d begin to find things a little more challenging – in fact, this tutorial was one of the main selling points of the course for me. We’ve been looking at planting containers for winter and spring interest, something I’ve never had trouble with in the past, but largely because I use a far less sophisticated approach. Typically, I’ll create containers for autumn and winter, using plants with interesting evergreen foliage and impressive berries to create the backbone of any display for several months, around which pots of more short-lived seasonal colour can be introduced – cyclamen before Christmas, tulips, narcissi and hyacinths later in the new year.

This modular modus operandi is reasonably foolproof, having the advantage that, as long as you get the main plants right, you can tweak by moving the smaller pots about, removing anything that isn’t performing quite as well as you’d hoped, and perhaps redistributing containers to draw attention to a particularly pleasing element. It allows both for serendipitous discovery, and wiggle room, and I’d be happy to recommend this way of working on these grounds alone, if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s more or less how the wonderful displays in the porch at Great Dixter are put together. And if it’s good enough for Dixter, it should really be good enough for anyone.

That said, there is another way to plant in containers – and, happily, it can be used alongside such a modular approach as I’ve become used to. The only slight fly in the ointment is that it’s a little more involved, requiring both more planning, as the planting needs to present interest over a longer period of time,  as well as a good deal more commitment, there being less wiggle room once everything has been planted in the one container. I’ve seen Harriet’s plantings, both at Whichford and online, and have no doubt that this is a system I need to master in order to take my container displays to the next level. As elsewhere in the garden, there are few things more impressive than seeing an effortless scheme seemlessly transitioning from one season of interest to the next, a continual dance as one performer retreats into the wings, and another steps forward to command stage. This is succession planting in pots. Time to play with the big kids.


The first things to consider when planting any container for the cooler months is drainage. In winter it’s all too easy for the soil to become waterlogged, and no plant likes to sit with its feet in water¹. To that end, make sure that whatever container you’ll be planting into has adequate drainage holes, and be sure to use a free draining compost, incorporating horticultural sand or  grit – I’d be happy to use a ratio of one measure of sand to four of compost in order to make conditions a little more sharp. Add no water retaining gel or crystals – great in summer, but deathly in winter – and avoid composts to which these ingredients have been added (it should be clearly evident on the outside of the bag, probably with some daft marketing slogan “Now with ADDED Wet-Water Waffle” kind of thing).

But now comes the crunch, and, as so often seems to be the case with these things, the key would seem to be a matter of perception. Instead of viewing the container and its contents in two dimensions (front to back and side to side), we need to be mindful of four. The third dimension allows us to correctly position within the pot the bulbs which will be so important for creating interest and change in the spring – larger bulbs, like tulips, at a greater depth than smaller bulbs, such as crocuses, for example. With the introduction of a fourth dimension, time, we have to consider the display over a matter of weeks and months, as the initial winter planting gives way to the delicate freshness of early spring, and in turn the vibrancy of mid- to late-spring.

It makes for a much more crowded pot than I’m used to, but the lecture notes were full of advice as to the relative planting densities and depths for different bulbs and, as ever, Harriet’s been on hand in the online classroom to answer individual queries in person, and to discuss the other material covered this week, including colour schemes and arranging containers.

This week’s assignment asked us to create a planting plan for a pot 60cm wide by 30cm deep, providing winter interest while using bulbs to extend the season into spring. I’ve opted for a silvery grey colour scheme over winter, with white flowers, introducing pinks and blues as the weeks pass into spring.

Planting plan of the top layer of evergreen perennials and shrubs

The top layer features evergreen perennials and shrubs that will persist from winter through spring. Planted fairly densely, as there won’t be an awful lot of growth over the period for which this container will be on display.

A rather ropey detail shot of Calocephalus brownii 'Silver Bush'

1. A single Calocephalus brownii 'Silver Bush' as a centrepiece, trimmed to around 25cm in height and width, for its silver, coral-like foliag. Technically it’s a tender, semi-evergreen shrub, but here in the South East I’ve had no problems bringing this through winter in the relative shelter of a container display near the house. That said, we’ve not had a particularly cold winter for a few years now. A hardier alternative would be its distant relative, Santolina chamaecyparissus, but that does tend to get a bit brown and manky towards the base in the colder months. The curry plant, Helichrysum italicum, is reliably and persistently silver throughout, but I’m not sure about the smell in winter (though I love it in the warmer months)!

Heuchera 'Peppermint' Little Cutie Series. Image © Heucheraholics

2. Four Heuchera 'Peppermint', a small introduction in the 'Little Cutie' series, 15cm in both width and height, with strong, mid-pink flowers in spring

Cyclamen hederifolium 'Album'

3. Eight autumn flowering Cyclamen hederifolium alba for their wonderful ivy-like variegated leaves and delicate white blooms

Senecio cineraria 'Silver Dust'

4. Eight large plugs of Senecio cineraria 'Silver Dust' for the soft, grey oak-like foliage


The bulb layers next, in order of descending depth.

Crocus 'Ladykiller'. Image © Crocus

Crocus 'Ladykiller' (white flowers with outer petals tinted purple in Feb/Mar) 8cm high, planted at a depth of 5cm.

Muscari armeniacum Image © Crocus

Muscari armeniacum (blue flowers in April/May) 15cm high, planted at a depth of 7cm.

Fritillaria mealagris var. unicolor subvar. alba. Image © Crocus

Fritillaria meleagris var. unicolor subvar. alba (white flowers in Apr/May) 30cm high, planted at a depth of 10cm.

Tulipa 'Flaming Springgreen'. Image © Crocus

Tulipa 'Flaming Spring Green' (white flowers in May) 45cm high, planted at a depth of 18cm.

Tulipa 'Foxtrot'

Tulipa 'Foxtrot' (pink flowers in April/May) 30cm high, planted at a depth of 15cm.

Narcissus 'Fruit Cup'. Image © Crocus

Narcissus 'Fruit Cup' (white flowers in April) 35cm high, planted at a depth of 20cm.

With thanks to Crocus and Heucheraholics for the use of images.

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¹Except maybe the swamp cypress Taxodium distichum, and even they like to leave at least their knees out of the water. You’d need a very big pot for one of those, though.

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Do have a look at the My Garden School website, which is still running its  Back to School campaign for 15% off all £145.00 4 week online courses in October. (Course start dates: Wednesday 7 October 2015). Click here and remember to use the code MGSBTS at the checkout for the discount.

about me

I’m Andrew, owner of Kent-based gardening business grow, and this is my blog.

I’m delighted you’ve found your way here, and hope you’ll stay a while. If there’s a common theme running through these pages, it’s something to do with my belief that gardens – and gardening – have the power to provide us with the stimulation and solace all too easy overlooked in the relentless routine of modern living. All the time I spent behind a desk in comfortable air-conditioned offices, many with fabulous facilities, I’d find my mind wandering to the garden. Comfort, I was beginning to understand, is not all it’s cracked up to be.

For me, spending time outside is tremendously energising. To rest a hand against the bark of a tree, to feel the whispering touch of wet grass or the crunch of fallen leaves beneath my boots; to suck in great lungfulls of air, and deal at first hand with the capriciousness of the British weather – this is where I want to spend my days. To be among plants, too; watching how they grow, form communities and interact with each other, with us and with the wildlife with which we share a space. You’d expect me to be in my element in the countryside, wandering through the Kentish fields and the surrounding woodland, but, walking back into town, through first the farms and then the outlying housing estates, it seems that these relationships become more apparent as the density of housing increases. In no small way this gives me hope; and while many people feel despair and anger at the eroding of planning regulations, and the talk of growing urbanisation, I see positive signs. The relationship between people and plants has been taken for granted for too long now, but – just in time – there is evidence that we are beginning to remember what was had been common knowledge for centuries. Throw in an understanding of the soil, and there might just be hope for us all, though admittedly we’re cutting it pretty fine.

Working in gardens has allowed me to expand the boundaries of my office – no walls, a ridiculously high ceiling, and the most intricately woven carpet imaginable. Writing about gardens seems to follow naturally – I can’t garden without thinking, and I can’t think clearly without writing. As something occurs to me, I’ll scribble it into the notebook extracted from the depths of some mud and twig-filled pocket, returning to my computer at the end of the day to input these collected ideas and half thoughts, maybe to arrange them into a blog post, an article, or a short twig for into-gardens. Only now I find it almost unbearable to sit for long at my comfortable desk in my nice warm study. My comfort waits for me beyond the back door, whatever the weather, and the garden is calling.

With Bill the border terrier, under gardener, charmer, and insatiable plant muncher

Gardening advice and writing Do get in contact if you have any gardening queries by clicking here, and I’ll do my best to answer them. If you’d like me to provide gardening related copy for your publication or website, or are interested in having your product reviewed on the blog, please send me an email at info@andrewobrien.com.

Of minor reshuffles, and free plants

The last weekend of September; fresh, sunny days, cold nights, and misty mornings. Autumn arrived with the most perfect weekend weather for gardening I can recall, and the torrential downpours through which it’s been necessary to work over the past fortnight are already receding into a distant memory.

Along with an abrupt drawing in of the evenings, the cooler night time temperatures seem to have descended upon us all of a sudden – the greenhouse thermometer showing below four degrees a couple of days ago. The knowledge that this happens at more or less the same time every year does nothing to diminish the mild sense of surprise we feel at the change; in company with the bees in the ode, we’d come to believe the warm days would never cease.

Apple time. Part of our first harvest of Laxton’s Superb

In spite of this, there’s warmth enough still in the soil for roots to grow and plants to establish themselves before the ravishes of winter. As a consequence, I’m hatching plans to move things around. And so the acanthus is coming out, found for a rough spot by the bonfire, where I have every confidence it will flower its socks off. This gives me a space into which to move Annabelle, one of my favourite hydrangeas, from the deep shade in which she currently mopes to a much brighter spot. albeit one with a tall hedge on the south side. And into the shady spot I’ll decant Fuchsia magellanica 'Hawkshead', another white flowered shrub, but one that seems content to produce its blooms in profusion even in relatively gloomy conditions.

September, then, is a good time for a garden reshuffle. But it’s also a time for discovering you have a wealth of free plants, in the form of perennials crying out to be divided. It is, of course, a matter of accepted horticultural best practice to divide your perennials every few years in order to restore vigour to the individual sections. Apart from anything, it helps to avoid the potential of having ever-expanding clumps of a single plant, with very little growth in the centre. So far, so strokey-beard. But, aside from earning you brownie points with the RHS (which do actually exist and can be exchanged for baked goods in any of the restaurants at the society’s four main gardens)¹, the joy of discovering that your stock of plant material has increased, with very little effort on your own part, is hard to describe to any non-gardener, but all too easy to understand for anyone who’s ever felt the pang of parting with six quid for a single two litre pot of some precious specimen.²

Earlier today it was necessary to cut back a small Persicaria affinis (‘Donald Lowndes’, if memory serves), which was in the process of escaping from the border and making its way across the drive. This attractive, creeping plant forms a semi evergreen mat with flower spikes ranging from white, through light to deep pink through summer and into autumn. It’s great for the front of a border, although once established it will need to be kept in check, as it produces roots from every node that comes into contact with the ground, a characteristic which gives you plenty of opportunity to successfully root cuttings with minimal effort. Once I’d trimmed the plant back to its allotted space, I removed the flowers from my cutting material – producing seed can be an exhausting process, and I’d rather the newly establishing plants concentrate their efforts on making healthy root systems.

Appropriately enough for a drive edge, this Persicaria is sufficiently robust to withstand being driven over. However, as it’s shallow rooted, and the planting holes little more than a scrape, today I used long steel pins to hold each section in place until the roots have taken hold.

Free plants, perfect weather, and rejigged garden. Somebody pinch me.

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¹Utter nonsense.

²That said, and providing it’s not coming out of the housekeeping budget³, noone should have any qualms about spending this kind of money on a plant from one of the many independent nurseries forming the backbone of the horticultural trade in the UK. This is what it costs to raise and nurture a plant to a saleable size in a retailable condition, while at the same time maintaining a viable business, run by experts in the field, with employees and bills to pay. Shelling out this kind of money – or more – at any of the larger chains, where you might expect economies of scale to be passed on to the customer, requires a different set of decision making criteria.

³On the occasions when buying plants can threaten to compromise the housekeeping budget, there are plenty of other options. Plant swaps, car boot sales, kindly neighbours, friendly gardening types on Twitter – gardeners are by nature a generous bunch, and keen to share.

Container Gardening with Harriet Rycroft, week 2

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What’s the difference between growing in containers, as opposed to growing in the ground? I’ve already written about how there’s less margin for error with a plant in a pot, the rootball having access only to the nutrients available in the container, and that much more vulnerable to sudden changes in temperature. In this week’s lesson, we were again considering the materials used to construct containers, but this time rather than from a purely aesthetic point of view, we’ve been looking at how, for example, a plastic or metal pot will typically have less thermal insulation than one made of good quality terracotta or stone, and how this should affect how you think about siting different containers.

Just as you need to develop an awareness of different microclimates in your garden when planting in the beds and borders, so too this needs to be factored in when planning displays of containers. Not just things like aspect, the location of frost pockets and wind tunnels, but also the potential for strong gusts to be bounced off walls and corners against which pots are placed, potentially causing harm to plant material through air turbulence. And, while you may think that your treasured plants are entirely independent of the ground, being safely ensconced within their pot and with roots nestled into your choice of an ideal growing medium, it turns out that the hard surfaces on which the containers are standing can still have a bearing on how well (or not) the plant thrives. As an example, and rather like an inverted version of the storage heater in my old Muswell Hill bedsit, a dark-coloured ground surface will absorb heat during the day, and slowly radiate the warmth back out at night. I remember this arrangement was pretty hopeless for me, as it meant the bedsit was toasty during the day when I was out at work, and freezing during the evening and night, but careful attention to the needs of your plants should mean that you can take better advantage of the principle.

Practical matters covered this week also included arranging containers in groups, watering and drainage, including the thorny issue of crocks, and the desirable properties of a good compost. Already having packed quite a lot to pack into one week, Harriet ended the tutorial with a consideration of what to look for when selecting plants for your containers, with criteria including foliage, flower and form, as well as texture and habit, and seasons of interest. Much to remember, and to help it sink in, this week’s assignment asked us to choose four perennials or shrubs which we thought would earn their keep in a container display.

Here are my choices.

Sarcococca confusa
Perhaps the least fancy Sarcococca, the Christmas box is nonetheless a plant I wouldn’t be without, growing it both in the ground and in containers. An evergreen shrub with a potential to grow over a metre in height after many years, I treasure it for its deep glossy, spear-shaped leaves, and the clusters of black berries. But mostly for the rich, heady, vanilla fragrance of its tiny white flowers in the depths of winter, filling the air with a delicious, warming scent at the most miserable time of year. During the spring and summer months, it lurks within the groups of containers, overshadowed by more flamboyant flowers and foliage, but once the tender things have been put to bed, it begins to come to the fore.

Close-up of Sarcococca confusa. Sadly not scratch-and-sniff.

Good drainage is essential – in fact, I’m learning you can go as sharp as you like with this plant, which will happily seed itself into sand and gravel (we discovered it when a friend noticed seedlings below the window from which she’d periodically lob spent, cut stems that had been brought into the house for the scent). It will also need a certain amount of clipping, as it doesn’t naturally assume a particularly neat habit, and with age it begins to throw out shoots in unexpected directions. A happy Sarcococca will begin to sucker from the root stock, so you’ll need to keep an eye out for an appropriate time to repot, or else pull the suckers off and pot up into a free-draining compost for free plants.

Euphorbia characias subsp. wulfenii
This evergreen subshrub might not be the rarest of specimens, but it certainly earns its place in many different settings. Growing to 1.5m in height, and often rather larger around, the most striking feature for me is the colour – grey-blue foliage, topped with huge acid green flower heads in spring which persist for months. It’s not known for its fragrance, but having worked around it in several locations, I can confidently announce that it gives off a pronounced smell which might be described as bitterly earthy, or woody, but which reminds me of nothing so much as coffee grounds. 

Euphorbia characias subsp. wulfenii in flower. Less yellow, more blue in real life.

The leaves are long and narrow and, in common with many spurges, arranged in whorls around the long, serpentine stems, which leak a toxic latex sap when cut or broken (the sap can cause contact dermatitis, so best avoided or quickly washed off). It will survive in a large container, and is relatively tolerant of most soil conditions except waterlogging – err towards the dry to be on the safe side.


Melianthus major
The most tender of my selections, practically herbaceous in my part of the UK, but growing as an evergreen subshrub in climates more akin to its native antipodes, where it has become something of a weed. Here, we love it for its large, pleated glaucous foliage with deeply serrated edges. I was once told by the head gardener of one of our major gardens that it wouldn’t flower in the south east of England, but mine decided to contradict this pronouncement, producing a massive maroon flower spike that November. Just before the frost and the wind reduced the entire thing to black mush.

The leaves of Melianthus major. Remember, not all peanut-scented things are edible.

I have quite a knack for killing this plant, so timely winter protection is a must, and growing it in a pot rather than the ground is, I am convinced, the way to go, at least for me. It will also let me get it up a little higher off the ground than might ordinarily be the case, away from the reach of Bill, with his leaf munching mania, as the peanut-scented leaves (another woody fragrance) are toxic to dogs.

Fatsia japonica
I have heard this glamorous relative of ivy sneeringly classified as a ‘carpark plant’. But, as every plant so labelled is an utterly reliable, unfussy, robust and attractive affair presenting year-round interest, I don’t see it as anything to be sniffy about, and I can’t get enough of its large, glossy palmate leaves. Even better, in summer, older plants flower with the most eerie-looking white umbels. A statuesque presence, in the ground it will happily grow to eight feet in both height and circumference, although in a container it will assume more modest proportions. Happy in shade, dry or damp, it will provide a luxuriant, tropical backdrop to any planting all year round.

Glossy palmate leaves of Fatsia japonica.

Do have a look at the My Garden School website, which is still running its  Back to School campaign for 15% off all £145.00 4 week online courses in October. (Course start dates: Wednesday 7 October 2015). Click here and remember to use the code MGSBTS at the checkout for the discount.

Container Gardening with Harriet Rycroft, week 1

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It can be easy to get carried away when window shopping for containers. With such a wealth of variety in size and shape – not to mention price – I find I’ve often created a wish list that far exceeds my budget, let alone my available space.

And then to complicate any decision further, there are the different materials and finishes to be considered, each with their own characteristic textures: ceramics (including glass), glazed or unglazed, metals, wood, stone, as well as all manner of plastics and resins. I’ve just been exploring the possibilities of making my own containers using hypertufa – a mix of perlite, cement and sphagnum peat moss – and plan to give it a go once I’ve decided upon a sustainable alternative to the organic element. Everyone has their own favourites, and I tend to be drawn towards terracotta and zinc galvanised containers, whilst shying away from plastic.

Materials snob? Possibly, though this isn't snootiness at the notion of mass production, but rather sadness at the cynicism of flooding the market with “containers” that are little more than giant injection-molded buckets with poorly finished seams, not to mention the apparent willingness of the general gardening public to buy the hideous things. It is pleasing to surround yourself with objects and materials which reflect the ethos and values you hold, in the garden, as with every other space in your life. Terracotta speaks to me of the earth, of craftsmanship and skill, while galvanised iron objects possess the rugged honesty of the early-industrial period. Both materials, along with stone and wood, achieve a beautiful patina with the passage of time, while plastic merely bleaches and becomes brittle.

So far, I seem to have made a good job of proving my opening statement. All this fuss over the pot, when I'm really far more interested in the plant than on the object in which its root system will make a home. But, while it can’t be denied that a sympathetic match between container and contents can produce a pleasing effect, there is one exception to all of this: the upcycled container, the old box, tin or broken bit of crockery, destined for landfill but given at least a temporary reprieve, pressed into service as the custodian of a plant’s delicate parts. However humdrum its origins, I can’t help but find the combination of faded utility and luxuriant growth immensely compelling, hopeful and encouraging.

No room for the rubber duck. © Sara Venn

It’s the end of the first week of the Container Planting course at My Garden School. Harriet’s video talk and notes saw her at pains to have us consider our objectives in relation this form of gardening, whilst providing a comprehensive overview of the “whys and wheres” of using containers within the garden. Underpinning all I detected an exhortation to adopt a conscientiously purposeful approach, which could present me with a minor challenge, relying as I do rather on instinct and whim in this area. For the first week’s assignment, we were asked to find photos of four containers we’d like to use, explaining what had drawn us to them, where we would consider siting them within the garden, and why.

Here’s my selection.

The Whichford Pot

There’s nothing quite like a well-made vintage or handmade terracotta pot. I’ll settle for mass produced terracotta if I have to, but I'm not a huge fan of those ugly square rims.

Whichford pots aren’t exactly cheap, but having been to the pottery and seen the care and attention to detail that goes into each one, I have no qualms about parting with the money, even if I can’t afford to do it that often. And it’s not an astronomical outlay – we’re talking eight quid for a 7 inch pot, as opposed to £1.50 for a bog standard diy shed effort – buy one a month and give up the ciggies, or Sky+. Actually that would equate to several small pots, or something more fancy.

Whichford terracotta is unlike the smooth, flat stuff you might be used to. It’s a richer, orangey brown colour, a more tactile, open texture, which reminds me of biscuits (ginger nuts, to be specific). They often incorporate text into the design, whether simply manufacturer’s name around the pot, or a quote from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I’m a sucker for words in the garden.

The pot I’ve chosen for my imaginary shopping list is from the Shakespeare range, featuring a line from one of Puck’s speeches around the rim. I’d have it next to the kitchen door, planted with wild thyme, and other aromatic spices, well within reach when I need something to perk up what I’m cooking.

The trefoil pot

A few years ago, I spotted this container in an issue of Gardens Illustrated, and its haunted me ever since. The article appeared again in the special edition magazine from the publishers under the title “Pots of Style” (still available from the website), so at least I can look at a picture of it, even if I can't find anything similar to what must be a pretty one-off piece in the shops.

The mottled grey and white material is glass reinforced concrete, although at first glance you might be forgiven for mistaking it for galvanised steel. The plants perfectly complement the container – Sedum 'Cape Blanco', Anthemis marschalliana, Jovibarba allionii and Lampranthus spectabilis, planting by Sarah Price.

This is clearly too small to be placed on the ground, too large for the windowsill, and the wrong shape for the shelves of the etagere. But its a perfect colour complement for the slate table in the courtyard, and I could sit and gaze at it while enjoying my morning coffee.

The broken teapot

This is an object with great sentimental value, but one that has sadly outlived its original purpose. I bought it during my first year at university, and it has been my constant companion for a quarter of a century, playing a central role in the many tea ceremonies that punctuate my day. But the glaze has finally cracked in many places, and it has become rather more porous than is useful in a teapot, an article inside which it is useful for the tea to remain until required it, at which point it should exit via the spout, not through various hairline cracks about the perimeter. Unable to bear parting with it, I decide to re-imagine it as a planter, although to date I've yet to find the perfect companion for its slightly awkward nature, and am currently stuck in a kind of limbo of indecision.

It is the perfect size for the outdoor window ledge, or the top of the hideous plastic gas meter cover which I try to obscure from view with an arrangement of pots in containers.

The old boot

I get through a work boots at an alarming rate; something to do with unusually mobile toes. It's a bit annoying – they split and start letting in water, or develop a weakness in some unrepairable spot, but seem otherwise perfectly sound. It's seems a shame to get rid of them, but I can't really have dozens of pairs of old boots cluttering up the place. It has struck me that, with an appropriate lining, and some drainage holes, they would make excellent plant pots – and I'm not the only gardener to have worked this out. Lucy Adams, head gardener at Doddington Place in Kent, created an entire display for this years Chelsea Fringe based around a tower of planted up wellington boots, an absolutely stellar display where the bright colours of the wellies clashed appealingly with the flowers.

Boots full of flowers. © 2015 Lucy Adams

My old work boots are less extrovert, I think, but I don’t see why one or two planted up couldn’t nestle perfectly happily towards the front of an arrangement of pots.

Harriet’s notes for week 1 of the course are downloadable at the time of writing from this link.

In the meantime, do have a look at the My Garden School website, which isstill running its  Back to School campaign for 15% off all £145.00 4 week online courses in October. (Course start dates: Wednesday 7 October 2015). Click here and remember to use the code MGSBTS at the checkout for the discount.

Wisley Flower Show 2015

A quick dash to the Wisley Flower Show, there to spend a couple of pleasant hours mooching about, cooing over plants, saying hello to friends and most definitely not buying anything, the last of which objectives I failed conspicuously to achieve, lumbering back past the RHS Lindley Library towards the car laden with numerous bags of flaars. Hopeless. In my defence, some of them (previous edits read “most”, then “many”) are bound for clients’ gardens, and I entertain every possible hope that they may, at some point in the future, reach them.

Here are my highlights from a brief visit.

It was great to catch up with David on the Binny’s stand (we’d managed to miss each other at Chelsea and for some reason not crossed paths over social media) and to hear how things are going for them. The stand is looking wonderful – an inviting mix of delicate flowers like Geum 'Totally Tangerine' and white japanese anemones, with some wonderfully detail in the foliage, all shades of green and red, with Heuchera 'Green Spice', Rodgersia 'Bronze Peacock' and Tiarella 'Spring Symphony'. And, just in case you hadn't got the green and red thing, the great, dramatic form of Begonia luxurians. I loved the short, vertical accents of the Euonymus japonicus 'Green Rocket' across the stand and, nestling in amongst it all, the wonderful small white flower and acid green leaf of Geranium nodosum 'Silverwood', a great plant for dappled shade.

Not too far away on the stand of Madrona Nurseries from Ashford in Kent, I found the colourful arrow-headed leaves of Persicaria 'Purple Fantasy'...

...just a few steps away from its relative Persicaria odorata from Hooksgreen Herbs. This is used in South East Asian cooking as a coriander substitute, and was nestled among a wealth of other wonderful looking edibles. Had the temperature had been hotter, the smell would have been fabulous, but as it was, the volatile oils stayed put and I had to content myself with the sight of all these fine herbs jostling for space. I particularly loved the inclusion of variegated ground elder Aegopodium podagraria 'Variegata' which, though not as rampant as the non variegated version, can get a bit lively in the borders.

I’m not entirely sure what’s got into me this year, but I keep finding myself drawn towards orange flowers, and it was the sight of these amazing dahlias at Pheasant Acre Plants that drew me away from the herbs. I'm not sure my photography skills were quite up to representing the vibrancy of the colours, but they were breathtaking, perfectly complemented by the lively form of the blooms.

The Plant Specialist have put together a splendid display of late summer daisies, grasses and prairie-style perennials, where I discovered the hollyhock (Alcaea)/mallow (Malva) cross x Alcalthaea suffrutescens 'Parkallee' . Why didn’t I buy this? I was distracted by something else (more of that in a bit), but know it will be haunting my dreams tonight.

x Alcathaea suffrutescens 'Parkallee'

x Alcathaea suffrutescens 'Parkallee'

Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants were as inundated with keen plant buyers as always - so much so that I could barely see Rob when I arrived and didn’t get to say ‘hello’ (sorry Rob). The display and the quality of the plants was as stellar as we’ve come to expect, and also as correct – I was reminded that I've been referring to Aster divaricatus several times in the past couple of weeks, when it’s been reclassified as Eurybia. Shame on me (though, to be fair, it’s still Aster in the Wisley plant shop). I was particularly taken with two plants, both of which boast flowers that, in their natural form, appear to have been caught in a force ten gale. Perhaps they reminds me of my hair.

My own haul consisted of two plants I've been trying to track down for months, and was half hoping to find in stock today – both for other people’s gardens, sadly. Firstly, Althaea cannabina, a wonderful, tall, airy pink-flowered mallow-type specimen, whose presence distracted me from buying the Alcathaea at The Plant Specialist.

Secondly, Tiarella 'Sugar and Spice'. I know everyone says that so many of these cultivars are the same, but there’s nothing quite like the leaf on this – a large, oak leaf shape, deep glossy green, with a dark maroon splash in the centre – and everywhere seems to have been out of stock all year, even at the RHS shows. Six of these came home with me, courtesy of Heucheraholics.

And then, having stuffed my face with pelargonium cake and generally got under the feet of Heather and Fran on the Fibrex Nursery stand as they tried to serve the great and the good, I started treating myself to more plants I’ve had a hankering after: three pelargoniums, P. 'Renate Parsley' (new to me), the very beautiful but slightly difficult 'Ardens', and the scented 'Charity', with its variegated cut leaf and orangey scent. And, on an impulse, the evergreen fern Asplenium trichomanes, largely because it looks a bit like the maidenhair fern Adiantum capillus-veneris, which I am remarkably good at killing, in the hope that it might be slightly better at evading my homicidal tendencies.

Not a bad collection of booty, considering I wasn’t supposed to be buying anything. Sadly, though, in spite of seeing it growing down by the glasshouse, still no sign of Amsonia hubrichtii for sale. I’ll keep looking...

Container Gardening course with My Garden School

Spring containers in the porch at Great Dixter. An inspiration at any time of year

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There’s always something to learn with gardening. By which I mean, about gardening, not through gardening, although Gertrude Jekyll was undoubtedly bang on the money when she opined that “a garden is a grand teacher”. Rather, I'm thinking about my own continual process of horticultural education, and the efforts I need to go to in order to keep my gardening brain fed. I love my work as a self employed gardener with my own list of clients, but if there's one element missing, it’s the regular input of peers, and the mentoring presence of people with more wisdom and knowledge to impart than I can imagine myself ever being in possession of. That’s one way in which social media has been a godsend – a veritable army of exactly these folk, ready to cheer and to chide as necessary, as enthusiastic and abundantly generous with their superior knowledge as I could wish. And, by some miracle of the modern age, they all live in my phone.

This is wonderful when I need to ask a question, or feel the need of some encouragement or affirmation. But in order to build my knowledge I need to supplement this with some more structured learning, and so I resolved this year to start taking courses on certain subjects, one of these being container gardening.

Containers can be tricky things. Rarely will you get away with bunging a plant in a pot and forgetting about it, unless you have a penchant for brown, dead looking things. Containers are an ideal solution for people who don’t have a traditional “garden” where you can’t plant in the ground – perhaps only a windowsill or balcony. They’re also great in that you can fine tune the growing medium and the conditions to the particular requirement of the plant you wish to grow, but you’ll need to remember that that plant is more dependent upon your attention when it comes to feeding and watering than it might be had you planted it in the ground. There’s less of a buffer against the temperature fluctuations, too, so you’ll need to be fairly constantly watchful for what the weather might throw at you – under the wrong conditions, container-grown plants can go over with alarming speed.

And then, there’s choosing the type of container, planting for succession, and arranging groups of containers in a pleasing display. Anyone who’s dashed home from a visit to Great Dixter, full of enthusiasm and dying to have a go, will be aware that it’s not as easy as it looks.

I have several books on container gardening by a variety of authors, but if there’s one person in the country who really knows the subject, it has to be Harriet Rycroft, until recently head gardener at Whichford Pottery. I met Harriet a couple of years ago on a visit to Whichford in the Cotswold countryside – a fascinating place for the story of the pots and the wonderful variety of forms and texture, but rendered even more so by the flamboyantly joyful planting combinations bursting out wherever I looked. Harriet is one of the generous souls I alluded to above, and we often chat on Twitter, but there's a limit to how much you can quiz a person, even on their specialist subject. Really, I needed to steal Harriet’s gardening brain to gain her knowledge, but how to achieve this without imposing some measure of inconvenience upon the good lady was beyond me.

And then she announced the Container Planting course at My Garden School – a little jig may have escaped me in my joy. This is a four week course, with video tutorials, detailed course notes and regular assignments, and one-to-one contact with the tutor through a virtual classroom – I can ask as many questions as I like without feeling bad about it. I’ll be posting again here as I go through the course – which begins for me today – to let you know more about the course as I work my way through it. I hope you’ll join me again to find out how I’m getting on.

In the meantime, do have a look at the My Garden School website, which is has just launched a Back to School campaign for 15% off all £145.00 4 week online courses in September and October. (Course start dates: Wednesday, 2 September / Wednesday, 7 October 2015). Click here and remember to use the code MGSBTS at the checkout for the discount.

Too early for the A word

This is the first year I can recall where I’ve not risked the ire of my fellow human beings with a premature mentioning of the A word. Hot weather saps my energy; while I’ll put a brave face on it for work, I’m keenly looking for the first signs of the change in season from the end of July. In recent weeks there’s been a stampede of people throwing up their hands in despair at the early onset of autumn, but while I’d be delighted to find their angst justified, I think it more likely that we're having a bit of a wet end to summer after a protracted hot, dry spell. It is, after all, still August. And this is, after all, England.

That’s not to suggest we shouldn’t expect to see signs of the approaching season; the night-time temperature is beginning to drop away from the uncomfortably clammy, while several mornings this past week have seen me pulling up the blinds to discover a fresh, chill mist knocking at the glass. Above all this, the thoughts of the gardener are beginning to turn from what can still be achieved in the beds and borders this year, to how best to prepare for the next.

One thing in particular will help with my own garden in a year from now – I need to face up to the truth about molluscs. I’ve been in denial, having evidently been at pains to create the perfect environment for snails in particular, although slugs too are well represented. Over the past few years I’ve adopted a fairly hands-off gardening style here; fine as long as I was happy to stand back and watch the dynamics within the borders, leaving the plants to their own devices, though it does naturally favour a survival-of-the-fittest scenario. Consequently, I have a late summer bed of flowering thugs – solidagos, Japanese anemones and crocosmias – while most of the charming asters, echinaceas and heleniums have been grazed to the ground by the battalions of snails emerging nightly from the heaps of lush foliage encouraged by my neglect. One tiny pocket of resistance against the endless onslaught is being offered up by Aster divaricatus. Rain battered and, by now, going over, it must taste disgusting to snails, for which I am immensely grateful. Its presence is a minor reprieve I surely don’t deserve.

Aster divaricatus, bravely soldiering on, albeit a tad dishevelled

From hereon in, then, a more interventionist approach is called for, which means gardening here in the same way I garden everywhere else. In other words, tidily, or at least being strategic about which areas I allow to become untidy. The forest of under-performing acanthus is to go – who knows, it may even flower better if I stick it in a less luxuriant spot – which will have the dual effect of removing a vast snail hotel, whilst freeing up a whopping great spot at the end of a bed into which I can plant something exciting. The geraniums will also be cut back – I don’t have anything too invasive (in the ground, at least – I have a specimen of the ridiculously vigorous pink flowered 'Claridge Druce' confined to a large pot), but they’ve been allowed to sprawl a bit this year. Except the phaeums, which I did subject to a Chelsea Chop.

I’m starting to get concerned that things might begin to look a little organised; will I in a few months – horror of horrors – find myself in the position of having “put the garden to bed for winter”? I think I should perhaps just take this one step at a time.

Anemone x hybrida 'Königen Charlotte'. A right bruiser.

Enchanter’s nightshade

As fond of weeds and wildflowers as I am, it wasn’t without a wry smile that I acknowledged the arrival of this plant in a bed from which I’d only recently been congratulating myself for liberating from ground elder.

Circaea lutetiana, or enchanter’s nightshade, has a similar creeping habit to that carrot which fills some gardeners with horror, but which I’ve always found myself able to tolerate, as long as it doesn’t object to a triple whammy of vigorous forking and pulling out, and a good strimming of its aerial parts when the urge comes upon me.

The botanical name possessing twice the magical power of the common (Circe being the sorceress of Homer’s Odyssey, and Lutetia referencing an old Latin name for Paris, the ‘Witch City’), Circaea isn’t part of the nightshade family (Solanaceae) at all, but rather a relative of willowherbs and the evening primrose (Onagraceae). It’s generally described as being “not particularly toxic”, so you probably won’t want to be dashing out to gather it up by the armful for pesto. As a plant of woodland glades and edges, it revels in slightly damp, light shade, and can establish large colonies if allowed to grow unchecked, in which situations it might reach its full height of around 60 centimetres, though I’ve rarely encountered it in a garden at more than a third of that size. While its underground rhizomes will take it only so far, its hairy oval seed capsules facilitate any designs it might have on wider conquest; towards the end of summer, it’s not uncommon for the dog owner to find several in the coat of their furry friend.

Although it’s not tiresome to pull out, it’s probably not something the gardener would want to encourage, unless in a woodland setting. That said, when in flower, I find it rather pretty – above the spear-shaped, opposite green leaves a spire-like raceme, rather openly (some might say ungenerously) populated with tiny flowers (reminiscent of some of the less abundantly-floriferous heucheras). The flowers themselves are white, sometimes with a pink tinge, and have two, deeply divided petals.

A large patch of the stuff in your borders is probably not be what you want, then. But if you should catch the odd plant out of the corner of your eye, flowering daintily away in some forgotten leaf litter under a large shrub, you might want to leave it be. Noone likes to run the risk of upsetting an enchantress.

A perfect time to trim the lavender

Work in someone else’s garden for any length of time, and you soon become familiar with the rhythms of your clients domestic life – part of them, in fact. So I took in my stride the arrival of a lorry to empty the septic tank. “He usually comes very early, even before you get here”, my client told me, almost apologetically. Whatever the reason for the tardy arrival of the night-soil porter, it was enough for me to know I’d be present for the duration of the fragrant operation. I planned my day accordingly, intending to be as far as possible from the area in question when the time came. Or at least upwind of it.

What a stroke of luck, then, that I should have returned after a week's break to find the lavender going over. In this exposed garden – windy, often sun-baked, with a thinnish layer of soil over flinty clay – Mediterranean plants like to grow leggy. To mitigate this I try my darndest to be ruthless in removing flowers as early as possible so the plants can concentrate on arranging themselves into pleasing, fat pebble shapes. I just have to be convincing when explaining to the client why this is necessary. Nothing convinces the bees – just the one sting today though, and that was only because I knelt on the poor thing.

The first lavender bed was a bit too close to the action. We planted Lavandula angustifolia 'Imperial Gem' – it reaches 40 to 50cm in height, with a deep purple colour to thumb-length flower spikes atop grey green foliage. It also has a good scent, but not that astringent note that you get from the hybrid L. x intermedia hybrids. Today, I think I would have been glad of that. Instead, I made a tactical retreat, and found something to do in another border.

There’s more spiraea to grow up to the right of the hedge at the back. A bit short just now.

Musk mallow

It seems to be a month for happening across plants with deeply cut leaves. This cheery customer has made its presence known in several gardens – sadly, not mine – over the past few weeks, having certainly found its way there of its own accord. If God loves a cheerful giver, then the gardener can spare the odd warm fuzzy for the generous self-sower, particularly in the case of one as pretty as Malva moschata f. alba, the white form of the musk mallow.

Standing at around 60cm high (two feet in old money), with five pure white, crepey-textured petals surrounding the typically exotic-looking pistil and stamen arrangement of the mallow and hollyhock family tinged, in this case, with the pale pink of the anthers. Although some of the flowers are born in the leaf axils, a characteristic of this plant is the collection of fat, round flower buds with pointed tips, opening in order from the outer edge towards the centre.

In the border, this achieves an effect of white, butterfly-like flowers floating over frothy fresh green foliage, in much the same way as Cosmos bipinnatus 'Purity', or one of the white flowered forms of Nigella damascene ('Miss Jekyll White', for example), while in height occupying a position somewhere between the two.

Weedy? Not particularly, it would seem, although its prowess at seeding itself about has been referred to above. I think its somewhat refined features might cause the discerning to refer to it being in possession of more ‘garden-worthy’ credentials than certain of its burlier relatives – certainly rather more genteel than Malva sylvestris with its whopping great leaves. Now there’s a plant that invites itself in, smokes your pipe, drinks your brandy and sticks its feet up on your table.

The white musk mallow is an altogether more restrained affair, albeit one that found its own way in uninvited. That said, you can be sure I’ll be saving seed as soon as it appears ripe.

Old lady plants

Let’s get something straight at the outset. I have no desire to disparage old ladies. Civilisation, in my opinion, has been built, sustained, and will long survive largely due to the influence of old ladies. Sadly though, and for reasons unfathmomable to me, old ladies don’t, on the whole, get to write history books, and so their part in the shaping of the modern world remains, for the most part, unacknowledged.

However, having thusly tabled my preemptive defence against a charge of disrespect towards the elderly and female, I find myself unable to deny that I have, on more than once occasion, sought to impugn the reputation of a group of ornamental annuals, perennials and shrubs by applying to them the soubriquet ‘Old Lady Plants’ – albeit a pattern of behaviour not seriously indulged in since childhood.

What qualifies as an Old Lady Plant? Anything with large blooms, the blousy, the frou-frou. The mophead hydrangea is an archetype, though the hollyhock and paeony fall comfortably into the same group. Somewhat confusingly, smaller flowered specimens are not excluded, so brightly coloured fuchsias, trailing dwarf campanulas and the charteuse splash of Alchemilla mollis would be equally welcome, as would any flower that you might find scenting soap, or drawer liners. Lavender, and Lily-of-the-valley, then.

But the characteristic possessed of the most excellent recommendation to my childish sense of logic, was that the plant should be found growing in the garden of the old lady who lived on the corner of the street in which I grew up. Old lady? She was probably sixty, if that. You have to hang around a bit longer to be an old lady these days. You can be a mad cat woman as soon as you like, though, unless you’re a feller. In which case, should you find yourself living on your own, you’d best get a dog if you want to avoid suspicion and abuse from the local ragamuffinry.

Looking back, I wonder if it was possible that I was trying to define cottage garden style, while never having heard of the concept? Or perhaps, at the very least, making some effort to distinguish this particular garden aesthetic from the other fashionable look of the seventies and eighties, the one heavily reliant upon bedding plants and pampas grass. I remember proudly tending rows of alyssum and african marigolds along the front edge of the narrow flower beds which edged our back lawn. I don’t remember anything except bare soil between those rows and the fence behind, except a deep red paeony at one end, and a choisya at the other, the latter of which, mum would say, wrinkling her nose, “smells of cats”.

The thing is, having looked with disdain upon these plants in my youth, I now love each and every one. Perhaps I’m slowly transforming into and old lady?

I think I probably flatter myself.

Cut-leaf cranesbill

The rear third of my garden is a wilderness, in which long meadow grasses and wildflowers frolic with abandon. I imagine the neighbours must hate it – this being the only part of the garden they can see from their windows. Bill, on the other hand, loves it, sniffing about for traces of fox and cat, and self-medicating by consuming vast quantities of cleavers – which makes him immediately sick – and then reappearing with the fur around his muzzle ebellished with clusters of tiny green seed capsules. I know he will complain with plaintive whines as I pull these free, but the memory of this procedure never seems to deter him from repeated forays into the undergrowth.

The wildflowers here are, of course, not the kind of wildflower that anyone seems to want – certainly not to be found as constituents of the more fashionable of wildflower mixes you might find in a garden centre or online, but rufty tufty native fare. You know – weeds. So if goosegrass isn’t your thing, we can do you buttercup, dock, woundwort, rosebay willowherb, ribwort plantain, and several varieties of thistle. And nettles. Lots of nettles.

And romping through this lot a kind of wild geranium that I haven’t noticed here abouts before. I’m used to working in the company of Herb Robert, with its pink flowers and red stems like strawberry bootlaces (I’m noticing an increasing habit to draw my metaphors from either the confectioners or the cake shop), but what struck me most about this obvious relative of that worthy weed was the discrepancy in size between the leaves (up to two and a half inches round, and so heavily dissected that the lobes appear almost like antlers), and the pink flowers which, by comparison, are tiny. This is Geranium dissectum, the cut-leaf cransebill, and the disparity just mentioned appears ludicrous, like some comic character in a cartoon strip with a burly frame and shrunken head. But the flower itslef, with its is five heart-shaped, sugar-pink petals, contrasting with the noticably hairy sepals, is exquisite.

The Plants for a Future database records a whole host of medicinal uses, both internally and externally, and both the leaves and roots are rich in tannins, and can be used to create a brown dye. All parts of the plant are edible, though it’s probably not something you’d want to seek out as a delicacy.

It’s all gone over now, at least in my garden, doubtless a few weeks early due to the particuarly dry conditions. This is rather a shame as I’d have liked to have got some better pictures of it. Looks like I’ll have to wait until next year, though I have my camera ready in case I catch it lurking in the shade under a hedge somewhere before this summer’s out.

RHS Hampton Court Flower Show 2015, part 1

They could at least have turned the fountains on for me

I have been fortunate enough to have spent the past two days at Hampton Court, helping Fibrex Nurseries to set up in the Floral Marquee on Sunday (another gold winning display for them, hurrah!), and attending press day on Monday. 2015 is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Show at Hampton Court. This is a truly stunning location, bisected by the the Long Water with its fountains, spanned by four pontoons, with the royal palace forming the focal point at the end. No matter how warm it gets – and, to my memory, Hampton Court is always hot and sunny (clearly I’ve blocked out the rainy years) – there’s always a cool breeze by the water, and a shady spot to sit beneath the lime trees which flank it in avenues on either bank, an ideal place to pause and to mull over the many things to see during the day.

This year the Show has been organised into three zones: Grow, Inspire and Feast (or respectively, Plants, Gardens, and Grub, if I was in charge of things. Fortunately for the RHS, I’m not). The first of these, the Grow zone, consists of the plant village, Floral Marquee and Plant Heritage areas, and here you’ll find wonderful plants, details of national collections and a wealth of expertise generously given from many of the best nurseries in the UK. You could easily spend your entire visit here, but just over the water the Inspire zone beckons, playing host to the show gardens and the trade stands, the Festival of Roses marquee and the Country Living pavilion. Further up the path from the smaller Summer Gardens you enter the Feast zone. Initially, I’ll admit I felt a little disgruntled. In the past this whole section has been given over to small gardens, so to discover that half of them had been replaced with cafes and restaurants could give the impression that the horticultural and design aspects of the show are being dumbed down in favour of commercial considerations. However, there’s more to Feast than eateries – the presence of the the Cookery Theatre and a full programme of talks from speakers including Alys Fowler, James Wong and Greg Wallace indicates that the RHS are looking to ramp up their evangelical efforts concerning the link between plot and plate, which can only be a good thing. On Monday, I narrowly missed a demonstration given to a group of schoolchildren by Raymond Blanc in the children’s community garden of Henri Le Worm (I would have loved to have attended, but couldn’t quite tear myself away from the plants in the Floral Marquee).

One final general note before I get on to specifics, which I record here largely for my own benefit in the hope that it might also be useful for someone else. Navigation is a big issue for me around the showground – on past visits I’ve lost my bearings and only discovered a huge section just before I was due to leave. It really helps to carry a map of the Show with you, but if you don’t fancy paying almost a fiver for the catalogue in which it appears (much of which is available for free on the RHS’s excellent website), then use your phone to take a photo of one of the free-standing maps along the main route. Without a map, the rule of thumb is this – if you’ve not yet made your way over the water and to the opposite gate to the one by which you entered, you haven’t seen all there is to see. (Coming from the car park end via the Long Water Gate, the place where I would invariably get confused is a little choke point at the lower end of the Summer gardens, which takes you through an avenue of trees before opening out into an area leading down towards the conceptual gardens and the Thames Gate.)

Onto the gardens. There are over thirty in all over four categories, show, historical, conceptual and summer gardens. Here is a taste of those that made the biggest impact on me.

Green roofed wheelie bins and permeable paving on the Community Street

The Community Street, designed by Nigel Dunnett, illustrates the current RHS campaign, Greening Grey Britain, which is promoting the use of plants to enliven the hard, grey areas of our towns and cities, transforming unloved areas of harsh concrete and paving into healthy, productive and engaging spaces for the whole community. As housing density increases and our natural green space is eroded, this is a vital initiative if we’re to preserve our wellness and sanity in an increasingly crowded world, and I’ve been keen to see how the issues are addressed at the show.

All rather grey on the Community Street

You enter the space through a recreation of a very grey, rather unloved street in Bristol, complete with abandoned car, litter and a fridge in one of the front gardens. Wall art depicts three of the main issues with our grey city space – rainwater runoff and consequent flooding, the urban heat island effect, and particulate pollution of the air. The garden goes on to demonstrate – with many information boards and an army of keen planty evangelists – how an informed use of horticulture coupled with appropriate hard landscaping can combat each of these problems.

Detail from the Community Street

Detail from the Community Street

Detail from the Community Street

Detail from the Community Street

Plenty of places for bugs and bees to set up home on the Community Street

Wildlife friendly hawthorn hedge and log piles on the Community Street

The planting here was magnificently bold, dense and rich, and if Nigel Dunnett takes the props for coming up with the ideas, then great credit must also go to Kitty Wilkins and her army of volunteers for implementing the intricately detailed plans.

Detail from the Macmillan Legacy Garden by Ann-Marie Powell

The Macmillan Legacy Garden is the gentlest tour-de-force. Ann-Marie Powell has created a tranquil, edge-of-woodland space, lush foliage and white birch bark contributing to a soothing pallet of greens and whites – which just happen to be the sponsor's primary brand colours, also including copper/apricot tones from their secondary pallet in the planting, for example with the verbascums and the russet tones in the epimedium foliage.

Detail from the Macmillan Legacy Garden by Ann-Marie Powell

As a response to the turbulent and emotional journey followed by any family whose life has been touched by cancer, it’s a perfect place in which to seek sanctuary, to pick your way through the plants across the ribbons of water which weave through the paving, past the avenue of birches with their seating, and across the stepping stones to the seclusion offered by the softly rounded structure whose surface has been planted with ivies and ferns and other woodland plants.

Detail from the Macmillan Legacy Garden by Ann-Marie Powell

Detail from the Macmillan Legacy Garden by Ann-Marie Powell

A lush and slightly sinister note is introduced by the arisaemas, and perhaps even the gunnera has a slightly spikey, other-worldly feel which suggests elements of confusion and uncertainty. Maybe it’s easy to read too much into the individual choices of plants, but the overall effect manages to be at the same time soothing and stimulating. Just the kind of place I'd like to wander in, lost in thought.

Detail from the Hadlow College ‘Green Seam’ Garden by Stuart Charles Towner and Bethany Williams

It was interesting to see my old college represented, Hadlow’s ‘Green Seam’ garden, designed by Stuart Charles Towner and Bethany Williams winning Best in Show. This garden presents us with an allegory of how horticulture can play a part in improving the lives of those living in areas of social and economical deprivation, mirroring the work of the Hadlow Group with the Betteshanger Sustainable Parks initiative seeking to bring regeneration to the ex-mining community near Deal in east Kent. Big business and politics, rather than grassroots gardening, but it was encouraging to see the designers illustrate nature’s ability to reclaim post-industrial sites by depicting the colonisation of the old spoil heaps by pioneering wildflower species.

Detail from the Hadlow College ‘Green Seam’ Garden by Stuart Charles Towner and Bethany Williams

Detail from the Hadlow College ‘Green Seam’ Garden by Stuart Charles Towner and Bethany Williams

Another particularly accomplished effort was Vestra Wealth’s Encore – A Music Lover’s Garden, by Paul Martin. A sinuous path of consolidated hoggin between Corten steel edging winds through a landscape of sandstone rocks and lush planting, accompanied by a narrow rill, before descending into a small amphitheatre for musical performances surrounded by a curved pool.

Detail from Vestra Wealth’s Encore Garden by Paul Martin

Some beautiful rusted steel sculptures nestle among the plants, their shape and form reminding me of pollen grains under the microscope.

Detail from Vestra Wealth’s Encore Garden by Paul Martin

Detail from Vestra Wealth’s Encore Garden by Paul Martin

Detail from Vestra Wealth’s Encore Garden by Paul Martin

Detail from Vestra Wealth’s Encore Garden by Paul Martin

Detail from Vestra Wealth’s Encore Garden by Paul Martin

Detail from Vestra Wealth’s Encore Garden by Paul Martin

The small space from Squires Garden Centres – Urban Oasis by Mark Charles might not win great plaudits for originality of design, but I loved it.Neat boundary hedges, cottage garden borders, with the centre of the lawn given over to a wildflower meadow and bounded by a mown grass path, and a red brick path leading between twin seating areas to catch the morning and the evening sun, it represents a vision of what is achievable in a typical small domestic garden. A wonderful, wildlife-friendly space.

Detail from Squires Garden Centres – Urban Oasis by Mark Charles

Detail from Squires Garden Centres – Urban Oasis by Mark Charles

I would have liked to have seen more in the way of community gardens. Not to say there weren’t community spaces – there were some beautifully designed ones incorporating many a thoughtful idea but, as with Chris Beardshaw’s garden at Chelsea this year, they were posh, expensive ones, clearly designed by professional garden designers. While I’m aware that one of the reasons to come to an RHS show is to see how the professionals can push boundaries and use the latest, cutting edge techniques, materials and thinking, I can’t help but think that including more grassroots gardens, created from the ground-up by enthusiastic end users, would help to circumvent the uncomfortable feeling that these gardens are being bestowed upon grateful paupers by professionals, however well informed and intentioned (last year’s A Space to Connect and Grow from Jeni Cairns and Sophie Antonelli was a great example of how to get this right). While I think this could be a valid criticism of spaces like the Community Street and the Vestra Wealth garden, it’s less applicable to the Macmillan Legacy Garden which, while being conceived partly as a communal space and undeniably high end, is not designed as a living space, but more of a therapeutic space rather like the gardens of the Maggie’s Centres.

In past years, there’s been a definite feeling  that people without pots of money to throw at the garden were being catered for. I wonder if that might have been lost a bit this year. It would also be good to see more on elegantly practical solutions to the kind of real-world problems that the garden and home can throw up, as with Mike Harvey’s A Room with a View from 2013’s Show, which built a wonderfully terraced garden on the spoil heap of soil excavated for the foundations of a typical home extension.

These small criticisms aside, it was good to see that the Conceptual gardens section is as bonkers as ever. It might not be everyone's cup of tea – not everything here is always my cup of tea, to be honest – but it’s good to see some interesting ideas being explored. I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of synaesthesia, ever since hearing in a university lecture how the composer Oliver Messiaen, who experienced the condition, once demanded that the violins should play a particular section of his score “a little more pink”. So it was fantastic to experience the DialAFlight: Synaesthesia Garden by Sarah Wilson, which presents a heady mix of sensory stimulation with a creative combination of coloured lights, projected trigger words, sculpture and planting, inside a white canvass dome representing the mind of the synaesthete. Sadly I was enjoying myself so much I neglected to take any decent photos (please do let me know if you have any and I’ll feature one or two here, with appropriate credits, of course!).

Another garden I found particularly powerful in this section was Steve Smith’s SMART Vision garden, which portrays the attitudes of society to those suffering from mental health issues by enclosing the entire space in an austere, grey wall, wrapped in yellow and black hazard tape. Through peepholes in the wall you glimpse a tranquil space inside, a white, zen like circle of raked gravel surrounded by lush tree ferns and foliage plants, prehistoric flora that shows the resilience of nature left to its own devices. The inner walls are mirrored, so the space inside appears vast, and a strange feeling of fellowship succeeded the initial shock of discovering that you weren't the only person peering in on spying many other inquiring eyes among the plants.

Detail from Steve Smith’s SMART Vision Garden

Detail from Steve Smith’s SMART Vision Garden

Please click here to read the next part of my blog on RHS Hampton Court Flower Show 2015.

RHS Hampton Court Flower Show 2015, part 2

Why would you go to a flower show – for the the gardens, or for the plants? It’s true that some people go for the experience – event and retail marketing seems to be all about ‘experiences’ and ‘destinations’ now – but while these are animals I can identify in a crowd, quaffing their fizz* and seemingly more interested in being seen than in seeing, I have little to no real understanding of them. So...gardens, or plants? The show gardens can be inspiring, stimulating, frustrating and disappointing – I’m sure on occasion I’ve felt all of these emotions while pondering a single garden. But as for the plants on displayed in the floral marquee? I’d have no option but to laugh in the face of anyone who would dare to suggest that they are ever anything less than wondrous.

Wonderful textures and plants on the Todd’s Botanics stand

While working in the Floral Marquee on Sunday, I’d spent a lot of time trying not to tread on the trailing parts of Geranium 'Dusky Crug', one of my all-time favourite cransebills, which was on the beautifully planted stand of Todd’s Botanics. All purple, chocolate foliage and soft pink flowers, it’s like a deliciously sepia version of a vibrant garden favourite.

Geranium 'Dusky Crug', Todd’s Botanics

Imagine my delight on finding the very similar Geranium 'Dusky Rose' at Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants – so similar in fact that I’m having trouble telling the difference, and will have to wait till someone more knowledgeable can enlighten me!

Geranium 'Dusky Rose', Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants

Cosmos sulphureum 'Diablo', Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants

The Hardy’s display also featured the fabulously flame orange of Cosmos sulphureus 'Diablo' – I’ll definitely be growing this next year  –

Verbascum 'Firedance', Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants

and, while we’re on the subject of the infernal, the metre high flower spikes of Verbascum 'Firedance'.

A few  plants appeared to be following me around. This is a common experience at flower shows – you engage with a particular variety, and then can’t help noticing it as you move around the marquee, and even out into the showground. 

The first of these was an interesting Rose 'Hot Chocolate', first sighted by me on the stand of Madrona Nursery, and then seen again in the marquee for the Festival of Roses. It’s a floribunda rose with a long flowering season, about 90cm high, with very good disease resistance, striking blooms of a deep coppery red shade  on deep green leaves. Yet another for my wish list.

Rosa 'Hot Chocolate', Madrona Nurseries

Rosa 'Hot Chocolate'

Another apparently ubiquitous rose was 'Blue for You'. Not being a huge fan of roses in the lilac areas of the colour spectrum, it’s a source of interest to me that I've managed to end up planting both 'Twice in a Blue Moon' and 'Harry Edland' in our own garden. Perhaps I should go for this one and make it a clear hat-trick.

My next planty stalker was Hydrangea arborescens 'Invincibelle', which looks to me very much like a pink tinged Annabelle. I wonder if it does the green and cream colour change thing like the better known variety?

Hydrangea arborescens 'Invincibelle', The Big Plant Nursery

There was another pink tinged hydrangea on the stand of the Big Plant Nursery, with the vomit-inducing cultivar name 'Love You Kiss'. If you can keep hold of your dinner, however, it’s an attractive lacecap, with a reddish tinge around the rim of the petals.

Hydrangea 'Love You Kiss', The Big Plant Nursery

It’s always good to see local nurseries, and another Kent representative is Plantbase. Graeme had brought his party piece, the terrifying Solamnum pyracanthum, with its violet flowers, glaucous foliage and bright orange spikes. The Sid Vicious of potatoes.

Solanum pyracanthum, Plantbase

There was also my favourite tea tree plant, Leptospermum scoparium 'Red Damask'.

Leptospermum scoparium 'Damask Red', Plantbase

By now, it was probably time to cool off after all these hot colours. Nowhere better for this than the display of heucheras, heucherellas and tiarellas from Plantagogo. I was charmed by the dark purples and silver tones of Heucherella 'Cracked Ice', with its creamy white flowers.

Heucherella 'Cracked Ice', Plantagogo

A similar cooling effect can be had with Heuchera 'Silver Celebration'.

Heuchera 'Silver Celebration', Plantagogo

I was also interested to see the new introduction, Tiarella 'Emerald Ellie' – not a million miles away from 'Sugar and Spice'.

Tiarella 'Emerald Ellie', Plantagogo

While on Sunday I was busy assisting Heather and Fran of Fibrex Nurseries with their pelargonium display, Richard was putting the finishing touches to the adjacent stand featuring their ferns and specimens from the national collection of Hedera (ivies) which they hold. A lush and shady work of art, I’ll be carrying a photograph of this around with me to flourish on the very next occasion (there will be several) when someone looks bored or rolls their eyes upon my suggesting ivies for their dark, north facing wall or fence.

Ivies and ferns, Fibrex Nurseries

I’m keen to go an explore both of these collections on the nursery – if I can just avoid being waylaid by pelargoniums – but the selection on show here demonstrated the range and variety available, and what can be achieved in a small space.

Ferns Asplenium scolopendrium and Adiantum venustrum surround a terracotta pot filled with Hedera helix 'Goldfinch', Fibrex nurseries

Hedera helix 'Ivalace', Fibrex Nurseries

The splendidly named Hedera 'Pink and Curly', Fibrex Nurseries

Hedera helix 'Spetchley', Fibrex Nurseries

And what of the pelargoniums? Here I have to exercise some restraint, else I’d be posting photos of everything in the display!

The first spot goes to regal Pelargonium 'Beryl Reid', with its outrageously frou-frou ruffles – salmon pink with  maroon centres. Gloriously flouncy.

Regal Pelargonium 'Beryl Reid', Fibrex Nurseries

Still with the regals, I met two similar varieties, 'Fringed Aztec' and 'Arnside Fringed Aztec', both with large white blooms with respectively red and deep pink markings in the centres.

Regal Pelargonium 'Fringed Aztec', Fibrex Nurseries

Regal Pelargonium 'Arnside Fringed Aztec', Fibrex Nurseries

Possibly as showy, but more delicate, is 'Fairy Orchid', with carmine blotches to the top of the two upper petals, and the characteristic ‘false eyelash’ markings to the centre of the flower.

Angel Pelargonium 'Fairy Orchid', Fibrex Nurseries

Used on the display for its fabulous cut foliage, Pelargonium 'Charity' has vivid green variagated leaves, with an orange citrus scent. The mauve flowers are probably the least spectacular thing about this plant.

Scented Pelargonium 'Charity', Fibrex Nurseries

Scented Pelargonium 'Ardwick Cinnamon', Fibrex Nurseries

My final offering from the Floral Marquee is an unassuming plant, that takes hold of you by stealth. I’m rather fond of its compact habit and small, glaucous leaves, a perfect backdrop to its small white flowers. But its the unexpectedly spicy scent of cinnamon from the crushed foliage that really sets this particular pellie apart. One that needs to be smelled to be believed.

All this has left me with the not unpleasant task of prioritising my plant wish list. I have a feeling that they're not all going to fit back in the greenhouse come winter, but that’s a worry for another day.

Please click here to read the first part of my blog on RHS Hampton Court Flower Show 2015.

* This isn’t to suggest that gardeners eschew the quaffing of fizz. In fact, we’re far from an abstemious lot, and are as good at this as we are at tracking down and consuming cake. It’s just that we do this as an adjunct to viewing gardens and drooling over plants, not an alternative.

Salvia ‘Kate Glen'

Salvia plugs on the potting bench. (The beer is for the slugs!)

Those awfully nice people at Unwins have sent me some plants to review.

Having been warned of their imminent arrival, today the postman brought me a small cardboard box continain three healthy looking plugs of Salvia 'Kate Glen'. Unwins are the sole distributor of this variety in the UK, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the plants perform.

I’m assuming that this is the same cultivar of Salvia nemorosa described on the website of Lambley Nursery in Australia, owned by David Glenn, who named the variety after his daughter. If this is the case, a letter 'n' appears to have gone astray somewhere in the journey from the antipodes, but the description of the plants seems to be more or less the same.

I’m particularly excited about these plants as I’ve recently had a run in with some voracious rabbits in one of my client’s gardens – rabbits who stubbornly refuse to read the literature which advises whether or not they should find a particular plant palatable. They’ve had a good go at just about everything, with the exception, I’ve noticed, of the achillea. While I now view lists of rabbit-resistant plants – on many of which salvia appears – with a degree of cynicism, I find that I’m encouraged by the rabbits’ apparent lack of enthusiasm for a plant with strongly scented leaves. Perhaps the salvias, like the achillea, will survive the onslaught of the critters.

Rabbit resistance is all very well, but unless you plant something with some aesthetic merit, you might as well cultivate a field of thistles. Salvia 'Kate Glen purports to reach a good 90cm in height, with bright green leaves on deep purple stems, and two-tone flower spikes – half the total height of the plant – pink in bud at the top, and opening violet lower down. The flowering period is reputedly long – well into autumn, apparently, and the plants are drought tolerant and frost hardy. Having initially potted the plugs on into 9cm pots, I’ll be trialling them in my garden at home before I consider exposing them to a site plagued by fearsome Leporidae. Here, we’ve only the slugs and snails to worry about. And a famously ravenous border terrier.

I’ll post again later on in the summer to let you know how they’re getting on.

Hole Park Gardens

To Hole Park near Rolvenden this afternoon, ostensibly to have a good nosey around the gardens under the expert guidance of senior gardener Louise Nicholls, although today I was just as interested in the cake and company. I’ve had cause to observe in the past what a fantastic cadre of gardening folk congregate on Twitter (and lately, Facebook too – though perhaps I’m a little late to the party on that particular platform), and today I got to meet several of them in person. Happily, I can report that, once again, I found them just as friendly, supportive, and knowledgeable in real life as they are online. And to think, someone once said that social media was no good for gardeners.

A gathering of gardeners among the generously airy planting in the Millennium Garden

There are three species of newt found in Britain. Apparently, they all live in here

But first things first - the cake had to be earned, and the prospect of refreshment was held out before us by Lou as an incentive to keep us moving through the garden – a necessary cruelty, since as a group we displayed on more than one occasion an inclination to linger in a particular space, the better to appreciate it in all its fulness. However, the desire to tarry in any one spot being incompatible with the imperative to gain an overview of a large garden within a set period of time, we were kept moving.

Rocky pauses to fondle a geranium

The gardens at Hole Park cover 15 acres, laid out and planted in the inter-war years by the great grandfather of the current owner, and featuring many distinct garden spaces (“garden room” doesn’t seem an appropriate phrase when including lawns, meadows and woodland). These include a tropical border, a sunken Italianate garden sitting between two long herbaceous borders, a lawn with exquisitely pruned standard wisterias, the rockery, camellia walk, wildflower meadows (known as the Policy) and bluebell wood with a brick ice house, and a formal lawn complete with yew topiary, a pool with fountains and a stunning backdrop of the wealden landscape. I made a rough running tally of at least 15 separate spaces – though I’ve probably missed one or two – all bound together by miles of tightly clipped yew hedging and views out into the Kentish countryside. And to keep all of this in check – just two and a half full time staff, including head gardener Quentin Stark. This is bordering on feat of superhuman degree – although I did notice that Lou drinks an awful lot of coffee.

Lou, coffee mug in hand, demonstrating that at least the sundial doesn’t wobble

The estate occupies a position on the map almost exactly half way between Sissinghurst and Great Dixter, although I’m not entirely convinced how useful it is to make a comparison with either of these. In feel and ambiance, it seems to me to be more akin to the gardens of its other near neighbour, Scotney Castle, only without the single, breathtakingly romantic picture-postcard view (the picture postcard view here, from the front of the house with a windmill on the left and a monument on the right, harks back to an earlier age of landscape design). It possesses a similar rolling topography, the sudden, Rousham-like plunge of the land towards the water course in the valley – perhaps a much wilder interpretation of a picturesque landscape than the national trust property – after all, Hole Park is a much later garden. We were of course too late for the magnolias and the bluebells in the woods, but we caught the tail-end of the display of the azaleas and rhododendrons, again providing echoes of Scotney. There’s also a similar interplay between parkland and garden – the more intimate, enclosed spaces opening out onto wide lawns, with the Policy, the dell and the woodland beyond.

The gardeners do a fabulous job of tending the formal hedges, lawns and border in the vicinity of the house. But it’s in the less manicured areas where the magic really starts to happen, along the grassy paths mown through swathes of wildflowers, in the glades and rides in the woodland area, beneath a giant gunnera beckoning from the further side of a pond apparently filled with vichyssoise, and fringed with candelabra primulas. These are the places I want to come back to and explore.

The gunnera and Persicaria 'Red Dragon' framing the pond of leek and potato soup

The long-awaited cake, by the way, was excellent.

With thanks to Louise Nicholls for leading the day, Quentin Stark and Edward Barham and the AllHorts Facebook group for their support.

Lou is planning to trek to Machu Pichu next year on behalf of Marie Curie. Do visit her justgiving page if you’d like to make a donation in support.